Some Terms

Activism: militancy; The ideology of activity or organization
for its own sake. The activist would moralistically argue that
it's better to go on a march that will change nothing than to
stay home and consider social reality. In the manner of the religious
fanatic, the militant (syn) use constant activity as a way of
repressing an awareness of their total social condition. "Sure
you may have a theory about us never changing the system but at
least we do something."

Can be a variety of leftism. Activist ideologists tend to spread
the despairing counter-part ideology of inactivism - which equate
any active intervention with militancy "Any sort of political
action just inhibits people's autonomy and makes real change harder.
Doing nothing is better."

Atomize: Originally, the smallest unit that matter could divided
up into. Market-place society atomizes people by dividing them
into purely separate, comparable units. When people circulated
from city to city or country to country merely to earn enough
to survive, they are atomized strangers.

Capitalism: The present world system, that started with the European
colonialization of the Americas and has expanded its reach to
the entire world and every part of life. It is based on wage labor,
exchange, and commodity production on a world scale. This system
included the so-called Communist Bloc when it still existed.

Commodity: A product, anything bought
and sold. A person's labor time can be bought by a capitalist
and so their creative power becomes a commodity like sliced bread.

Communism: Not the system that once existed in Russia. A social
system where human desires will replace exchange and profit as
the moving force in society. Communism will be based on people
directly controlling their creative activity.

Deficit: The difference between what the American government collects
in taxes and what the government spends in various evil programs.
Used by politicians to demand that workers give up wages, jobs
and houses to appease their guilt. See also Myth

Democracy: Any system where the majority shapes the decisions
that the government makes. see Permanent War, Permanent Elections.

Detourn: (de tôrn) v. [situationists Fr detour, change of
direction (fig) evasion, trick] to arrange disparate elements
of the dominant culture together to form a new work, esp. in a
way that reveals the true meaning and function of the original
elements. Detournment as revolutionary activity reverses the systematic
fragmentation of specialists - n.-ement (-mä) the act of
detourning

Exchange:giving something of equal value in return for someone
giving you an object. The more this sort of apparently simple
act dominates the world, the more each person is a purely atomized
unit and the more community cannot exist.

Ideology:The thought of power - ideas in the service of power.
Ideology is frozen thought but not all frozen thoughts are ideology.
The ideologist develops empty rhetoric whose real appeal is to
a person's unstated (and often unconscious) interest in maintaining
their immediate material conditions - their part in capitalism.
When a subjectivist ideologist says "all that matters is
immediate pleasure," their rhetoric might be appealing to
a student because it would justify their vapid, parasitic existence.
"Everyone's got to work, it's only fair" might make
those forced to work 60 hour weeks feel slightly better.

The Left: The left wing of capitalism. Historically, those involved
in the political system who wished to move closer to "socialism."
As the political system has become more of a conveyor belt for
the capitalist system, leftists have become spokespeople for the
most bureaucratic forms of capitalism. Leftist have in mind the
interests of welfare workers, teachers, prison reformer and professional
"facilitators." Leftists range from liberal who want
a government that takes care of people better to Leninist of various
stripes who still imagine the recreation of a soviet-style welfare-state
dictatorship.

Morality: See Against Capital And Morality

Myth: a magical story is used to give meaning to the lives of
people in a culture. The story of Adam and Eve was a Christian
myth. "Anyone can work their way to the top," "America
was founded on traditional values," "We have to work
twice as hard to pay off the deficit" are modern American
myths. Myths dominate people when they are alienated from their
lives by wage labor.

The Nation: a mythical community supposedly consisting of "people
living in the same general location, speaking the same language
and having the same general culture." This myth was used
to create capitalist governments by the national entrepreneurs
of first the US and France and then every region of the developing
capitalist world. Since there is no part of the entire world with
a homogeneous culture, nationalist ideology is really used to
unify people against those who are different. America was founded
on murdering native peoples and continues to base itself on racism.

Oppression: Being persecuted or subjugated by an unjust force.
All specialist of power focus on the unfairness of particular
oppressions without admitting the total misery of this society.
The manipulators of the most conservative talk of "crime,"
high middle-class taxes, and inflation. The left talks of racism,
sexism, homophobia and classism. But all the specializing of misery
makes it harder to understand the total misery of this society.

Privilege: A special immunity, right, or benefit enjoyed by an
individual. This society grants a vast of array of apparent privileges;
home-ownership, whiteness, American Express Membership, maleness,
or citizenship. But every "carrot" is only a chance
to participate more in the economy or to avoid the social terror
of today. Virtually no one gets real privilege from being a part
of this society.

Right: As capital has carved new social relations, the powers
that people had kept by using these informal groups has disappeared
into formal rights ostensibly granted by a higher power. As the
market economy is perfected, rights become simply an abstract
form of private property.

Role: an interchangeable act that is offered for each person to
take up at any given circumstance but is expected to be discarded
just as easily. When we are at the mall, we must be consumers,
at a cafe we be intellectuals. At work, we are expected to be
happy

Recuperate: (re cu'pär at) v. [situationist Fr recuperer
to retrieve] to put spontaneous or revolutionary elements back
into the language of the dominant culture and thereby trivialize
them and negate their creative or revolutionary power - Coopt,
n. -ation (a-shun) the act of recuperating.

Specialist: one who studies, works with, and by extension tries
to own any single category of knowledge; an expert. A biologist
is a specialist on animals. A manager is a specialist at giving
people orders. A political consultant is a specialist at manipulating
the passive opinions of voters. Ralph Nader is a specialist on
consumer rights. Ronald Reagan, the great communicator, was considered
an expert at communicating the orders of the government to the
population.

As this society reduces life to a machine-like order, its rulers
become bureaucrats/specialists who operate interchangeably in
the corporate, governmental or university bureaucracies. All specialists
become specialists in ideology. The ruling bureaucrats thus generically
manipulate people, information, and rhetoric according the economy's
orders. A logging company president becomes the California State
Universities president and then could conceivably become a politician.
Jerry Brown began as a Jesuit, became governor of California,
then was the left-wing cameo presidential candidate and now is
a radio talk-show host.

Specialize, Specialization:

Spectacle: (Spek tä kul) n. [situationist Fr Spectacle show,
movie, play etc.] A fusion of form and appearance. A form of accumulation
under late, declining capitalism. See also A Short Critique of
the Situationist International.

Star: Any arbitrary focus of spectacular attention.

The System: A vague term that became popular in the sixties and
seventies. The know-it-alls of today attack this vagueness because
the vague can still be useful. It's true that talking about the
system makes it harder to blame any one person or group. But the
term system speaks to the instinctive feeling people have that
all the apparently unrelated parts of this society form a single
whole.

Big talkers of one sort or another naturally attack the idea that
TV stars, politicians, corporate managers, college professors
and the big talkers form a single, invisible class of ruling experts.

Terrorism: The use of bombs, armed attacks, fear and secret cells
to wage conventional warfare against an existing state. Terrorist
ideology always winds up using the methods of the

capitalist state; the specialization of power and a population
that is kept passive spectators. And the terrorist group generally
aims to recreate a new capitalist state on the basis of "national
liberation." (see nationalism)

Union: An organization that acts as a broker between labor and
capital. Thus, any organization organized to explicitly accept
the conditions of this society while ostensibly demanding more.
It is no surprise that unions act against the working class.

Wage labor: when a person sells their activity for money. This
seemingly simple operation is the basis of our society's power,
growth and decay. One person paying another to work is an apparently
simple relationship that hides how the workers' own power to create
becomes something that confronts them as a commodity, something
external, outside their control.

Bibliography

Marx, Mumford, Reich and Nietzschie are important and widely available.
Here are more obscure English language texts that helped form
our perspective. Other works by the following authors as well
as Debord, Vaneigem, Luxembourg and Eisler are also important.
Further literature is available at our address.

Lautremaunt, Les Compte de: Les Chantes de maldoror,

Barrot, Jean: Eclipse and Re-emergence of The Communist Movement,
Black & Red Box 9546 Detroit, Michigan 48202 - now out of
print, write us for news of reprints etc.